Legacy Collection: Pick Your Ride and Pick Your Ped

Pick Your Ride (PYR) and Pick Your Ped (PYP) were created to fill a requirement that most spawners didn't really cater for and that was a managed collection of cars or vehicles, that relied on a well-kept external configuration file. The config file itself was created from an Excel sheet containg various bits of mandatory and optional data. The mod was another request on 5Mods and was created as an exclusively private mod for that person. Mainly because it utilised my new menu system that was never deemed finished enough for public release.

The goal of the spawner was to provide easy and quick access to an extensive collection, with minimal inputs... so no endless scrolling of page after page of car names. So I decided on 2 essential categories, Manufacturer and Model. To make things more visually appealing, I added two graphical elements to the menu. If you were selecting the Manufacturer option, a small car-paint stylised logo would appear for that manufacturer... like this. I actually created 87 of these images for many manufacturers.

If you were selecting the model, then you had the option to display a car thumbnail inside the info-pane.

The info pane would display certain additional elements from the Excel sheet, like mod creator, vehicle year, modkit ID, that kind of thing. Here's a short video showing how those parts of the menu worked. You can see the infopane is optional and can be disabled from the menu.

The problem with having an extensive collection (and we're talking 700+ cars for the person that requested the mod), being able to get to any car with minimal keypresses was essential. So for that I added two features.

1) On Manufacturer or Model, pressing any key would take you to the menu item that started with that letter. So if you wanted a Dodge, just press 'd'. If you were on Ford and wanted an Escort, select Model and press 'e'.

2) To further refine the selection, you could press SPACE and that would let you enter text that you knew was in the Manufacturer or Model. So if you wanted Buick, go to Manufacturer, hit SPACE and enter 'bui' and when you hit ENTER, it would go to Buick. This actually proved invaluable for Porsche because hitting 'p' paused the game but entering 'por' with the alternate option would get you straight there.

These two options meant that you could get anywhere in your collection with very few keypresses.

If you watch that video again, take note of the bottom section of the menu. As you scroll to different cars, each one is pre-validated, meaning you know whether the model is going to spawn or not, without waiting for the dreaded "Invalid Model" message to appear. The validation actually happens pretty much instantly, but adding the delay meant that you could skip through the vehicles without it having to create and validate the models Once a model is validated, the result is stored for that session, meaning it only has to happen once. The activity animation is there for cosmetic purposes while the delay timer counts down... feedback to the user is always important, no matter how short or insignificant it might seem.

You can see there is a "Configuation" option in that menu and that's not for tuning the car but for saving presets of that car. So you go into your favourite trainer, set your car up how you want it, then save that as a preset. There is no limit to how many presets you can save per vehicle, all are stored in a preset file for that individual car. Each preset now stores around 47 different components including tuning parts, paint colours and extras.

Once I had the configuration system working, I then added the option to spawn the car using those presets. So you basically had access to fully configured vehicles, that always spawned just as you liked them. This was especially important for those cars that required specific paint and livery combinations. If you were in a car that had several presets, when you went into the configuration option, it would try and match up the current vehicle with a saved preset and select that option if it found a match. So you never had to remember if the current vehicle has a config or not. Here's a shortish (2 minutes) video showing the configuration menu.

If you didn't care about presets but liked tuning parts, then you could select an option to spawn the car with random tuning parts and it would apply random tuning based on what parts were available.

PYP is basically the exact same system as PYR but for Peds. The main differences are the menu selections are 3 tiers, Gender, Category and Name and there is a customise menu where you can save presets and also configure the ped. There are nowhere near as many options for a ped, so I decided to build the customisation into the menu. As with PYR, Peds can be spawned using any saved preset.

Also, when you are selecting the ped, there is a custom PedCam for getting a good look at your newly spawned ped.